Defying traditional laws of physics, researchers may have
found a way to blast through imminent roadblocks on the highway to
faster and smaller computers.

Using modern quantum physics, a research team from NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, CA, and the University of
Wales in the United Kingdom has discovered that entangled pairs of
light particles, called photons, can act as a single unit, but
perform with twice the efficiency.

Using a process called "entanglement," the research team proposes
that existing sources of laser light could be used to produce
smaller and faster computer chips than current technology allows.
Their paper appears in the today's issue of the journal Physical
Review Letters.

"Our economy constantly depends on faster and faster computers,"
said JPL researcher Dr. Jonathan Dowling, a co-author of the
paper. "This research potentially could enable us to continue
upgrading computers even after traditional manufacturing
procedures have been exhausted."

Currently, in a process known as optical lithography,
manufacturers use a stream of light particles to sculpt computer
chips. A chip is basically a grid of interconnected on-off
switches, called transistors, through which electric current flows
and enables computers to calculate. As companies crowd millions of
transistors into tinier chips, electric current travels shorter
distances, resulting in speedier processes.

Chipmakers shine a laser light onto photosensitive material to
create a stencil-like mask, which is used to carve silicon into
the components of transistors. However, the producers can only
provide transistors with dimensions as small as those of the
masks.

Today's state-of-the-art chips have transistors measuring between
180 and 220 nanometers, approximately 400 times narrower than the
width of a human hair. While traditional computers have the
ability to perform with transistors as small as 25 nanometers, or
3,000 times narrower than a human hair, this presents
manufacturing obstacles.

The light manufacturers use to produce today's transistors has a
wavelength of 248 nanometers. It becomes increasingly difficult to
use light with shorter wavelengths to produce transistors with
smaller dimensions. In fact, according to a central principle of
optics called the "Rayleigh criterion," 248-nanometer light can't
create features smaller than 124 nanometers.

However, this new research, still in its theoretical stage, could
provide a bypass of the Rayleigh criterion. The research team
proposes that entanglement would allow the use of existing sources
of laser light of 248 nanometers to produce computer chips with
dimensions of a fourth of the wavelength (62 nanometers) or
smaller compared to today's limits (124 nanometers).

Entanglement would allow researchers to use the intermingled
properties of two or more photons to obtain subwavelength spatial
resolutions. Albert Einstein called this intermingling of photons
process "spooky action at a distance" because the particles can
immediately influence each other over huge distances, even halfway
across the galaxy.

Here on Earth, entangled photons can be produced by passing a
light beam through a special crystal. In this quantum lithography
proposal, a pair of entangled photons enters a setup with two
paths. While the two particles travel together and act as a single
unit, it is impossible to determine which of the two paths the
pair has taken. In a strange effect of quantum mechanics, however,
each photon actually travels down both paths.

On each path, the photons act like a rippling wave with peaks and
valleys. After traveling on their own path for a while, the two
photons converge on a surface. Because the light particles making
up each wave were originally entangled, the result of adding the
photon waves together is to create patterns on the surface
equivalent to those made by a single photon with half the
wavelength.

This process, in essence, enables the entangled photon pair to
produce patterns twice as small on each side of a chip's surface
as can be created by the single photons in the conventional
optical lithography procedures. Entangling more than two photons
would improve results even further.

While a number of technical challenges remain, researchers are
already working on developing materials that would be required for
quantum lithography.

This research is part of the Revolutionary Computing Technology
project in the NASA/JPL Center for Integrated Space Microsystems
(CISM). CISM is supported by the Deep Space Systems Program in
NASA's Office of Space Science. JPL is managed for NASA by the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

-end-

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Hmmm, that is very interesting, Russell. I don't understand, however, why
some strange quantum effect is needed when this can already be done by
simply making photons interfere with each other (i.e., don't make your mask
with the assumption that a square hole makes a square pattern, but with the
assumption that a square hole akes a 2D sinc-function type pattern,
according to diffraction). This already lets you get around the Rayleigh
criterion.

Sean

At 11:00 AM 9/27/00 +1200, you wrote:
>Well, maybe not for a year or 3 yet.
>Maybe about 2020 if we're still all here then.
>
>RM

Let me give my 2 cent translation. Physicist and engineers speak different
languages and think in different terms, but understand the same 'quantum' or
wave phenomena.

My spin on the spooky 'entanglement' phenomena is there is no
hyperdimensional connection, or hidden variable, or spooky action at a
distance.

The universe is a 4 dimensional nonlinear, anisotropic plasma that supports
'solitons' or nonlinear waves that dont disperse like normal waves, but stay
compact like particles. This plasma also is noisy - not the 3 degree
microwave background noise but a far higher frequency noise at the Plank
level, proven by such things as the Kasimir effect.

This energetic noise blows the charged and massive 'aether' up like
air in a foam, which allows it to be compressed and expanded longitudinaly
in the time dimension and transverse or shear wise in the space dimension.

Consider the atom that emits two simultaneous correlated photons. Such an
atom emits photons like an overvoltaged, avalanche junction will break down;
it is primed and waiting for the right burst of noise to cause the resonant
electron orbits to relax by emitting a pair of photons.

Understanding that the atom is soliton or energy bubble in a nonlinear
transmission line like
media, one can understand that by tuning one of the two paths the photon
will take (with a polarization detector), it will cause noise in that path
to build up just like random noise in a high Q filter is excites a standing
wave.

This will effect when the calcuim atom emits its two photons, and since the
two photons are correlated, fizisists will say "there is a spooky action at
a distance which caused measuring the polarization of one photon to
influence another photon across space and time". Bull.

A fizisist might say, "In the quantum forrest, the tree does not fall unless
there is somebody to listen". I say the quantum forrest is a forrest full of
noise, and an ear causes the
noise between the unstable tree and ear to build up a resonance and thus the
ear +
noise influences the time and direction the tree will fall.

So it sounds like these people are doing is aiming one photon from an atom
that emits two by keeping the path that the reverse photon will take
terminated. By using a diffration grating that focuses a noisy interference
pattern onto the laser plasma, the probability path emitted photons will
take is
determined.

They need to teach that particles are holes in an aether, and quit using the
term 'vacuum' when it isn't. Photons are solitons, particles are photons
trapped in spacial orbits, energy bubbels in the vacuum, and that vacuum
noise applies force to the compressed, nonlinear space in these solitons.

Now go gather the firewood for this heretic that told you a dirty little
secret, and don't go designing any photon torpedoe EMP guns or tunneling
nuclear
devices 8^)

Entanglement has been a known phenomenon for several years. There has even
been an experiement run at CERN I beleive where two entangled photons were
sent opposite ways down a miles long fiberoptic cable, and demonstrated a
way to "cheat" the speed of light.

While the light beams still travel at light speed, if one entangled photon
is processed in certain ways, the other also is affected, apparently
instantaneously. Quantum physics is wierd stuff.